Sunset at Monoliths’ Beach – digital painting

Last Updated on January 18, 2015 by Patrick

Today I am proud to present my first finished digital painting called “Sunset at Monoliths’ Beach”. It took me a while to post this presentation.

It is painted entirely in Adobe Photoshop using a Wacom Pen Tablet.

I had this vision of a fantastic, beautiful beach during sunset with silky high tides like in a long exposure landscape photograph, also with high-contrasty colors with a high color vibration that pops in the eyes of the viewer and with low saturated hues to balance the other colors. :)

I was entirely imagining this landscape with monoliths facing the sunset and bearing the ongoing tides of the sea blasting over them from time to time eroding them very slowly. I wanted both movement and stillness with great tones of warm and cold colors of the setting sun over the horizon.

I pictured these sea waves coming and going and I knew exactly what I needed to create these silky streaks of water and foam. I needed soft brushes but with various hardness values starting from zero percent all the way up to a hundred. I wanted to play both with the hardness of the brushes and with all the tonalities that the color palette could give me but with a certain balance to remain loyal to the composition and to the gestures of the landscape.

I started sketching my ideas from the very simple ones, keeping gesture in mind, to the very complex, like rocky texture details in the monoliths subject matter. And then went on to detail them as much as possible but to keep a certain painting feeling, not a “photorealistic” one. I didn’t worry about the end result for I had it in my mind all the time. The power of imagination kept it lively on the screen of my mind. As I said, I knew exactly what I wanted. All I had to do is to express it as loyal as possible to what I had envisioned and put it on the canvas.